I guess that's what the BNP means when it says it would offer "firm incentives" to persuade non-whites (and other groups it chooses to pick on) to leave the UK of their own accord.

It is a terrible indictment that Nazis could be allowed to fight their despicable battles and win them on UK soil. Recent events in Belfast will give tremendous succour and comfort to Nazis in other parts of the country. It will strengthen their resolve and they'll redouble their efforts.

It's been sickening not just to hear of the violence against the unfortunate Romanians but to listen to the justification put up by apologists for their attackers.

I've heard all sorts of views expressed.

These people, some have said in outraged tones, are not just Romanians. They are... wait for it... Roma (shocked pause); Romanian gypsies.

That's supposed to be enough to convince you that throwing stones through people's windows, threatening them with baseball bats in their own homes or spitting on them and threatening them in the street is all quite legitimate.

Then there are those who claim this isn't a racist issue at all. Oh no. Attacks on these people are perfectly reasonable because they're just economic migrants who've come over here to take our jobs. Actually, it's argued, economic migrants are asking for it.

Oh really?

So what does that say about the large numbers of Brits who go abroad to find jobs, buy houses, enjoy retirement or whatever?

My son is an economic migrant but no-one ever calls him that. He lives in Australia. No doubt he could be viewed as doing an Australian out of a job.

My daughter and her husband did the same. They worked in the Australian outback for a couple of years and came home with the mortgage virtually paid off.

The fact is that moving abroad is one of the few growth industries we still have. My goodness, there are even TV programmes telling you how to do it.

I have friends who live and work, or have lived and worked, in various parts of the world. They are all economic migrants going wherever the pay is good. If there's a little bit of sunshine thrown in, well, that can't do any harm, can it?

Were they spat on? Did they have their windows broken? Were they threatened? Well, no. Actually, they've all been made to feel very welcome.

And that's the thing, isn't it? People coming here from other countries to look for a better life are economic migrants, to be despised, threatened and humiliated at will.

By contrast, Brits who go abroad to look for a better life are ex-pats, to be respected and envied. They're the folks with the get-up-and-go who got up and went.

For several years now the press have been portraying Romania's poor, dispossessed gypsies as scum; the very spawn of the devil. When Romania joined the EU we were told we were going to be overrun by these people. A climate of fear was created.

Is it the Roma's portrayal by the press that has resulted in Northern Ireland's police authorities failing to protect them as they should have done?

In Scotland we have our own Nazis. They're the folk who want rid of English people and who spray paint slogans to that effect on English people's houses. But it's difficult to imagine that the police would ever allow concerted, co-ordinated anti-English attacks to go anywhere near as far as it did with the Romanians in Ireland.

Which begs the question: why have they allowed it to get to this stage with the attacks on Romanians?

As the Nazis within our own country grow in strength, bolstered by the police's inaction in Northern Ireland, our society will come to rue the day we left these poor people unprotected.

Questions must be asked about the role of Northern Ireland's police in this whole ghastly affair. A public inquiry should be held.

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